CFO Dan Curtis manages finances for OwnCloud, which manages the open-source project of the same name. Client firms can host their own cloud storage on the premises or remotely, for data and file syncing, sharing, and viewing.Dan CurtisName: Dan CurtisAge: 56Time with company: 8 monthsEducation: Bachelor of Science in business with an accounting focus from Boston CollegeCompany headquarters: Boston; Nuremberg, GermanyCountries of operation: U.S., GermanyNumber of employees total: 10CFO's areas of responsibility: Finance, HR, ITAbout the company: ownCloud is the company behind the ownCloud open-source project for data and file syncing, sharing and viewing. OwnCloud enables businesses[...]

Following its $2 million Series A this spring, enterprise-focused mobile startup�DoubleDutch�is today introducing a new app called Pride whose debut�coincidentally arrives alongside�reports that Microsoft is after�a startup that could be Pride’s competition: Yammer.��Like Yammer, Pride is also focused on workgroup collaboration, but, like most of what DoubleDutch does, it’s not just mobile-first, it’s mobile-only.Lawrence Coburn, founder and CEO at DoubleDutch, says the timing of Pride’s launch is “kind of unbelievable, actually,” given the reported Microsoft/Yammer deal.“It really is a ‘what are you working on?’ app with a couple of bi[...]

The world’s third-most widely used server technology powers the top social site on the planet, a billion hours of streaming video a month, the busiest blog site on the globe, and top content delivery networks like Cloudflare, but no one outside the web development community knows its name.VentureBeat recently talked to Nginx co-founder Andre Alexeev about the company’s high-performance server software that is now powering over 25 percent of the world’s top websites.“We’re like the man behind the curtain,” Alexeev says. “We power over 70 million sites overall — about 12 percent of the Internet, but still a lot of people have not heard of Nginx[...]

Smule helped show the power of the iPhone as a musical app platform with the release four years ago of Ocarina, which turned the iPhone into a digital flute. Now, the music app maker is following up its Hall of Fame app with Ocarina 2, which is designed now to teach people to play familiar songs for a price.While the original Ocarina app encouraged free play, letting people form their own songs or try and recreate tunes they already know, the new Ocarina 2 leads people through the actual process of learning a song. With a new Guitar Hero like interface in Play mode, users get prompted which buttons to press and how long to hold their notes. As they progress through the song, the app auto ha[...]